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5 Telling the Devil’s Story, Doctor Faustus and The Master and Margarita
- Baylor University Press
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163 s Doctor Faustus and The Master and Margarita Telling The Devil’s sToRy 5 In my opening chapter I drew certain ideas from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus with which to frame the discussion that followed: ideas in particular about an opposition between aesthetic immediacy, such as may be associated in particular with music, and a reflective consciousness that inevitably carries with it a sense of alienation. This dichotomy, in Mann’s novel, is advanced by the Devil; yet a liaison between the artist and the Devil may also be the condition of negotiating it. In this chapter I want to return to Doctor Faustus to consider not only its ideas about opposition, but the way in which, as a work of art, it both expresses and seeks to overcome such opposition. In particular , I want to consider the figure of the storyteller, the natural site of a reflective, mediating consciousness, which Mann directly opposes to the figure of the inspired artist. Doctor Faustus is presented by Mann not as a novel but as a biographical memoir, with the subtitle The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn asTold by a Friend, and in my first chapter I said nothing about that friend. The biographer is a strong presence in the work, commenting extensively and at every turn on the content of his narrative ; his foregrounded consciousness both mediates Leverkühn to us and separates him from us. What this does is to interpose between Leverkühn and ourselves precisely that dimension of reflective consciousness which Leverkühn’s aesthetic rejects. Although Doctor Faustus is clearly a work energized by the idea of Leverkühn’s genius, 164 The Devil as Muse s by the hypothesis of his late music, and by the Devil’s hugely persuasive aesthetics, through the narrator Mann’s art insists on its difference from the art of Leverkühn in composing The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus. That difference, the space between them and the possibility of bridging it, might be said to be its true subject. The narrator carries the faintly comic name of Serenus Zeitblom. He was Leverkühn’s closest friend in childhood and has followed his development all his life, with the greatest sympathy and concern; he is Leverkühn’s passionate admirer. For most of Leverkühn’s life, Zeitblom was the only person outside his immediate family whom Leverkühn addressed with the familiar du. Yet he was never truly the confidant of Leverkühn, who “admitted [no one] into his life,” and Zeitblom is temperamentally very different from his friend, as he himself well knows. In the opening pages of the book, he describes himself as “by nature wholly moderate, of a temper, I may say, both healthy and humane, addressed to reason and harmony.” He fears, therefore, that his reader may reasonably doubt whether “my whole existence does not disqualify me” for the task of writing Leverkühn’s life.1 This is a doubt which he shares. “For a man like me it is very hard, it affects him almost like wanton folly, to assume the attitude of a creative artist to a subject which is dear to him as life and burns him to express; I know not how to treat it with the artist’s playful self-possession.”2 This is more than a merely conventional apologia. Zeitblom is a writer who would have profited from some sharp literary editing. He is rather long-winded, sometimes clumsily circumstantial, anxious to get things right in a way that draws our attention to his own writerly self-consciousness; often he pauses to reflect on what he has just said, or to interject some detail about his own life and circumstances, or to express the turmoil of his emotions, and always with a certain formal deliberateness, a slightly pedestrian or methodical quality, as if careful to leave no word unsaid. A former classics teacher (he resigned his post under the Nazi regime) and a comfortably married man, the single most striking thing about him, which has no obvious connection with the rest of his life, is his lifelong fascination with Leverkühn. Our impression is of a mind disposed toward familiar human decencies, struggling to do justice to a subject—the nature of daemonic genius— which both touches him to the quick and is altogether alien to him. [3.95.233.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:46 GMT) s Telling the Devil’s Story...